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NASCAR: It will be business as usual for Jenkins

An unexpected, if not shocking, victory in last Sunday’s Aaron’s 499 at Talladega Superspeedway won’t change the way Bob Jenkins does his business in NASCAR.

He will still buy used parts when he can. He will continue to make his own cars and hang all the bodies. And he will continue to surround himself with drivers and crewmen who feel like they’ve got something to prove.

It’s not often NASCAR provides a feel-good winner like David Ragan last Sunday. His team operates more on guile and determination than dollars and technology. So when Ragan and Front Row Motorsports teammate David Gilliland paired in a nose-to-tail tandem to drive from fourth and fifth place on the final lap to a sweep of the top-two finishing positions, it rekindled the long shot hopes of every short-track driver with a big dream.

To understand just how improbable Ragan’s victory was, consider this: Jenkins has 406 starts as a car owner since 2005. Ragan and Gilliland gave him just his third and fourth top-five finish.

And his first win.

“There’s a lot of owners out there that they get the best available driver they can get, and they’re like a hired gun,” Jenkins said. “But the thing that I think makes our team different than some of the rest is we’re so close, and more than anything we’re friends, and I know I’ve got drivers that are capable of winning races. I’ve got guys at the shop that have the heart to win races. We just haven’t always had the resources.”

Big tracks, big upsets

Ragan and Jenkins aren’t the only unlikely winners in Sprint Cup history, but teams that far down on the sport’s power rankings rarely make the breakthrough. Restrictor-plate races at Talladega and the Daytona International Speedway seem to be the greatest equalizers in the sport. Of the five most unlikely wins in the last 28 years, four have come at either Talladega or Daytona.

In 1985, Greg Sacks was hired to drive one race for DiGard racing. The team actually wanted him to drive in the Firecracker 400 at Daytona to gain research and development.

When he won, it was considered the greatest racing upset in NASCAR history.

Lake Speed’s victory at the Darlington Raceway in 1988 was just as improbable, especially since he was running his own independent team.

Derrike Cope stunned the racing world when he won the 1990 Daytona 500, but only after Dale Earnhardt cut a tire and nearly crashed in the third turn of the last lap.

Brad Keselowski gave car owner James Finch his only Sprint Cup win in 2009 at Talladega in a finish that included Carl Edwards flipping and crashing into the catchfence along the main grandstands.

And more recently, Trevor Bayne gave Wood Brothers Racing its only victory since 2002 with a shocking win at the 2011 Daytona 500. His victory was made possible only after race leader Ragan, then with Roush Fenway Racing, was black-flagged for changing lanes on a late-race restart.

Ragan won $373,108 at Talladega and Gilliland earned $235,153. Together, they gave Jenkins the biggest payday in his racing career.

“It’s not why we race,” Jenkins said. “In the racing graveyard, my epitaph won’t be I won the most races or championships, but I want to be known as a team that did the most with the least.”